Karel The Robot

Introduction

Karel The Robot is a robot simulator that affords a gentle introduction to computer programming. Users write Karel programs and feed them to the simulator to watch them execute. Karel's programming language is similar to Pascal.

The definitive reference for Karel the Robot is the book Karel the Robot: A Gentle Introduction to The Art of Programming by Richard E. Pattis, Jim Roberts and Mark Stehlik (ISBN: 0471597252).

At the moment, Karel should run on most Unix based systems. There is a GUI that uses GTK, and there is a curses interface. It is built with GNU automake/autoconf, so the standard configure; make instructions apply.

Downloads

To download the karel distribution please visit the downloads page.

Documentation

The documentation is written in GNU Texinfo, and thus is available here as:

What's Next

It would be nice to get a Microsoft Windows GUI going so that kids with PCs available can learn to program Karel. Unfortunately I don't know much about programming Microsoft Windows.

And it would be great to improve the GTK interface so that it has a code stepper.

And it would be nice to have a world editor so that user's can create worlds graphically instead of typing in a text file.

Thanks

Thanks go to Richard Pattis and Jan Miksovsky. Richard Pattis wrote the book, and Jan Miksovsky wrote the original version of this software. See the documentation for more details.

And a great big thank you goes out to the SourceForge folks for making all this possible.

Updated July 27, 2000 by Tom Mitchell